Retrospektive - EMAF

Standish Lawder, one of the wittiest, wiliest, and most unpredictable of American avant-garde film-makers.
Moving restlessly from structural studies and painterly abstraction to found-footage intervention and diaristic
vignettes, Lawder's films range from the comic to the sublime (and are often both at once). The presented programs
will feature a near-complete selection of the films he produced in a great burst of creativity from the
late-sixties to the mid-seventies, the heyday of the Experimental Film movement in the USA when many artist
filmmakers rejected Hollywood story-telling conventions and instead used the film medium in ways related to
the aims of painting and sculpture of the period, that is, formal strategies, minimalism, unexpected dislocations
of time and space, emphasis on the materials and processes of film making, and the incorporation of
›found‹ elements. Standish's early films are emphatically non-narrative and, although some have elements of
wit and humor, they are not by and large concerned with standard concepts of movie entertainment. Many were
made on motion-picture printers which were invented by him to create special visual effects.
The materiality and the visual essence of the film strip itself are the real subjects of much of Lawder's film
making. For example, in ›Runaway‹, a scrap of ›found footage‹ is so relentlessly examined that the image becomes
dematerialized and the viewers' attention is increasingly focused on the abstract play of form and movement
tightly enframed on the screen. In a similar way, the obsessive repetitions, the photographic manipulations
and sense of visual entrapment is the basis of ›Corridor‹, the most visually demanding film on the programme.
›Construction Job‹ is constructed from nothing but a fond assortment of film strips from classics,
home movies, old newsreels and the like. The potential endlessness of the film strip underlies our reaction to
›Necrology‹; the spatial ambiguity of the camera's point of view informs ›Catfilm for Katy and Cynnie‹; the duration
of the film strip itself is measured automatically during our inspection of ›Specific Gravity‹. Lawder's
›Dangling Participle‹ is, perhaps, less formal and more fun, yet this film, too, is assembled exclusively from
pieces of film appropriated from classroom instructional footage of the 1950's.
›Necrology‹, (1969), demonstrates the many innovative qualities found in his work, particularly his ability to lure
the viewer into an unexpected consciousness of the film making process itself. The film opens with what seems
to be the motion of the camera, apparently mounted on a crane, moving without hesitation down and endless
row of people standing on an inclined plane, i.e. perhaps the various levels of a theater, balcony or football stadium.
People move into the movie frame from the bottom and exit at the top. Only gradually does the viewer
start to recognize the subtle incongruities and begin to question the validity of the image before him.
Paradoxically, ›Necrology‹ was filmed with the camera completely stationary; the people were the moving objects,
standing on a metal escalator. John W. Locke provides an in-depth discussion of Lawder's work in the May
1974 issue of ›Artforum‹. He describes the conclusion of ›Necrology‹ as an hilarious transformation of a serious
film into a comedy:
›The sound for the escalator sequence is a pompous Sibelius symphony. The score and the title make the New
York rush-hour faces seem especially solemn; they look dead. As the escalator sequence ends and the credits
roll onto the screen, the score changes to bullfight intermission music... The entire film quickly becomes a comedy
as the long cast list moves across the screen: Man Whose Wife Doesn't Understand Him, Fugitive, Interstate,
Pornographer, Ghost Writer, and so on until the viewer thinks that each person on the escalator has been
identified.‹
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